If you need to get out of the house and want to make sure you’re sticking to your metro boundaries, look no further than the closest housing estate – as most of these have lakes stocked with trout, and naturally occurring redfin. The beauty of these is that there will generally be a lake close by to your suburb that you can de-stress or get the family outside to over the weekends.

If you’re going to head to one of your local lakes, there’s a few things to look at when targeting the local fish. The redfin can be hit and miss depending on how big a population reside in the waterway – but a great way to find them is by lure fishing.

Setting up a rod with a small 2.5 inch soft plastic is a great searching method for reddies – and even better if you have any ‘weedless’ jig heads. Fishing a small minnow or creature bait will replicate the natural food source the best, as in most of these waterways the most common food is mosquito fish, galaxia, yabbies and warious aquatic insects.

On the trout front majority of them have been artificially stocked into these types of lakes by the Victorian Fisheries Authority. Due to the fact that they have been reared at hatcheries they respond a bit differently to certain methods at times. The very best method of finding them is to employ a coarse style pellet technique – which has all the ingredients that these fish are used to.

This berley method that we use is the main ingredient is the hatchery style pellets, that can be mashed down with hot water to form a loose mix, or crushed and hand fed around the area that you’re fishing. The best rig for this is our feeder cage rig, which can be viewed in the following link if you’re unsure as how to best set it up.
Click here > Stocked lake trout rig

Click here for a full list of stocked waterways close by to you>Victorian stocked lakes